Current Residents
Current Artist in Residence
PhotoAccess is thrilled to announce that Melbourne based artist Kirsty Macafee has been awarded the 2019 Double Exposure Residency. Macafee will arrive in Canberra on Thursday 5 June to begin a 5-week long residency.
PhotoAccess Director Kirsten Wehner said ‘Here at PhotoAccess, we’re interested in asking’ ‘What is contemporary photography?’ ‘What does a contemporary photographic practice look like?’ Macafee’s practice does not look like traditional photography. She draws on digital and analogue techniques to blend experimentation with craft methods. Macafee’s practice really does ask audiences to think about what contemporary photography looks like’.
‘PhotoAccess is a unique space for making, sharing and discovering creative photography and photo-based art. We’re a place where audiences can gather to explore how contemporary image-making shapes our world. I am thrilled to be welcoming Macafee to PhotoAccess and together with my team, we look forward to introducing her to our Members and the wider photographic and arts community.
Kirsty Macafee is a Melbourne-based artist working with images across digital and analogue technologies. Her practice is multi-disciplinary and process based, It is informed by an expanded and deconstructed view of photographic practice and engaged in post-photographic and feminist discourses.
Macafee’s practice straddles photography, textiles and sculpture. She often explores themes of loss and abundance, seeking to reveal the invisible. Macafee’s work traces parallels between how images function in a digital networked culture, simultaneously inhabiting multiple states, sites, and spaces, and contemporary questions of being.
Macafee holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (Print Imaging Practice) and Honours (first class) from RMIT University. She has recently exhibited at Blindside Gallery Melbourne and Craft Victoria. She has also been Artist in Residence at the Australian Tapestry Workshop and completed commissioned works for City of Melbourne and the Museum of Australian Democracy.
‘I am excited about the opportunity to spend time in the dark room (something I haven’t done for many years) and to explore a physical double exposure as a mode of making. Most of all I am looking forward to having the time, space and support to research and make without the responsibilities of routine daily life’, said Macafee
PhotoAccess is proud to be partnering with EAST Hotel to deliver the 2019 Double Exposure residency. EAST Hotel are generously hosting Macafee throughout her 5-week residency, giving her the comfort and space she needs to focus on her work. This residency would also not be possible without the support of our PhotoAccess Members and the wider community, who in 2018 helped raise the funds for this exceptional residency.
The Double Exposure residency aims to support the creation and presentation of new and innovative photo-based work and to contribute to public awareness of experimental photographic practice in a national context. The residency offers one international or interstate artist the opportunity to spend dedicated time in the PhotoAccess darkroom creating a new body of work, to be exhibited in the PhotoAccess Huw Davies Gallery, from Thursday 22 August 2019.